Zygmunt Bauman left behind him a mountain of writing – a blessing, a challenge, and a problem all at the same time. How do make sense of this legacy?

The books keep coming, both on and by.

This is the third and for the moment final volume of Bauman’s Selected Writings, edited with love and scholarly care by the team at the Bauman Institute. The first two, History and Politics and Culture and Art, have already been noted on this webpage.

What do we have here, under the canopy Theory and Society?

Lots. Imagine my pleasure when I broke the spine of my copy, and sat again with Zygmunt Bauman, but to be transported across the decades, back to when he was middle aged and I was in shorts. I had seen the manuscripts, and the proofs, but had forgotten all this. So I browsed Bauman on C Wright Mills, and on Gramsci – the two are aligned –, on Heller, Gillian Rose, Tom Bottomore, and Durkheim and those early and vital impulses, and then looked at the front cover – Lydia Bauman, resplendent here, again, in verdant green, and then the back cover and its text.

There we were, momentarily together again.

These writings offer a new point of entry to Bauman’s laboratory, or to his labyrinth. We see his mind at work, twisting and weaving ideas and the data of sociology. This is Bauman before Bauman, Bauman backstage. A remarkable achievement.

Who said that? How so? Well, there were always the sceptics, those who wanted to argue in effect that Bauman was intellectually lazy, just made it up, as though his later English language work was some kind of immaculate conception; that his was a sociology without data, or that Gramsci was a device of convenient manufacture rather than a significant source for thinking; and so on. Get im orf! Maybe the misfortune of some was to come too late, when Bauman enjoyed and employed perhaps too freely some mischief enabled by the magic wand of Liquid Modernity. A bit like coming to the Stones too late. It’s hard to go back to the beginning, especially if you presume that everything should be in English, or on Spotify.

So here is the data, expressing as it does a glimpse of the path of that extraordinary life and its numerous sources, influences and insight. Chapters on the above thinkers, and much more: elements of the even earlier thematic, and not only authorial or conversational engagements with peers and fellow enthusiasts. Chapters on personality, information, science, Athens and Jerusalem and Birmingham, modernity, change, humanism, and more, all this covering the period 1961 – 2012.

The vista is looking good, for those who may still be interested in Bauman and his work, or who have yet to arrive at the party. We have these three volumes; we have the doorstopper biography by Izabela Wagner; we have the small, compressed and compact guide by Peter Hafner, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar.

 We have the emerging work of the second generation, led by Dariusz Brzezinski and Jack Palmer. We have major interests and the critical mass of Bauman Studies in the PRC. We have major forthcoming monographs by Elena Alvarez Alvarez and tightly constructed overviews in press by colleagues like Carlo Bordoni.

The three volumes of Selected Writings offer a backbone to all this work of scholarship and enthusiasm. A remarkable achievement, indeed, both by the author, and by his editors and interpreters. A valuable resource for research, as well as a companion for a dip, a chance to see that mind at work once more: the wanderer above the sea of fog, then and now.